eyes and ears discovered their uneasiness Even the poultry were commoted in the farmyard, and the bees in their hives. The birds fluttered and screamed in the air; and a little migratory fish, called the cicirello, swarmed on the coast of Messina, although the season of its appearance in those seas is considerably

later.

stormy winds helped to render unquenchable whilst aught remained to be burnt. The oil, vinegar, and wine turned to vinegar, escaping from their crushed receptacles, flowed, as did the choked waters, into the granaries, spoiling the corn, which became utterly unfit for human sustenance. The springs of wells were corrupted or lost. And the dead bodies imperThe distraction of the animal kingdom fectly buried under the ruins that killed them, alarmed not man. He continued unappre- together with others long since committed to hensive of danger until a few minutes past the grave, whose sepulchres the same terrific noon on the 5th of February, when a tremen- agent of destruction had torn open, diffused dous burst, resembling thunder, from the en-pestiferous exhalations that generated mortal trails of the earth, effectually broke the bands of "mental" sleep asunder. The convulsed earth heaved, shook, opened wide her ponderous jaws, and in the same instant, as we are told, one hundred cities were overthrown, and thirty thousand human beings were buried under mountains of ruins, or engulfed in the yawning chasms that opened to swallow them!

disease.

But is it not the main purpose of these lines to relate merely natural ills, or to commemorate the overthrow of buildings; how much soever we may lament the ruin of the splendid remains of classic antiquity, of the solemn monuments of the piety of young Christianity, or of those huge majestic castles that stood a living record of the feudal power and magniBut the external outbreak of internal dis- ficence of southern Italy's rude Norman conorder ceased not with this first frightful work querors. The more direct effects upon our of destruction. Again on the 7th, on the fellow beings, the dreadful fate of some, the 20th, on the 28th, and even a month later, on marvellous deliverance of others, with circumthe 28th of March, were new shocks expe- stances in some cases almost comic, were and rienced, the destroyers of two hundred more are intended as principal subjects of the paper, towns or villages; and if they proved less and these shall be chiefly taken from Botta's murderous than the first, it was only because new and hard-to-read Storia d'Italia. Which the terrified inhabitants had fled from their shall we begin with? According to estabhouses, from the threatening neighbourhood of lished custom, with tragedy followed by farce? solid edifices, to dwell under tents or huts in Alas! the latter is hardest to find; for few the open country. These repeated shocks ex- are there, even of the happiest escapes, unalhibited, in union or succession, all the differ- loyed by something sad. Let us then abandon ent forms of convulsion known in earthquakes, the arduous task of accomplishing any artithat is to say, the lateral, the upward, the ficial arrangement, and take the anecdotes as downward, the undulatory, and the rotatory they present themselves, limiting all idea of shock; in some of these the sides of hills management to the choice of incidents. The broke off, and fell in tremendous avalanches, first mentioned by Botta, as if to cheer his burying trees, houses, rivers, under the pon-reader's mind after such wholesale natural derous mass; the rivers afterwards re-ap- horror, is one of the few purely ludicrous, and peared, but in new channels, and turbid and we the more willingly follow his example, as discoloured, as though mourning the desola- we purpose, for our reader's final solace, to tion they had witnessed and survived; in conclude with an extract from a tale founded others the solid ground was rent, and from the upon this identical earthquake by that always chasms issued streams of mud, and of chalk pleasing German novelist, Baron de la Motte more or less liquefied, that inundated the ad- Fouqué, best known here as the author of jacent low lands. And in the intervals be- Undine. tween the five days fatally distinguished by those greater convulsions, smaller shocks frequently recurred, whilst an undulation, sufficient to produce sea-sickness, is said to have been almost uninterrupted.

fast by the ankle as though he had been set in
the stocks. In vain he exerted his utmost
strength to extricate his foot! What is the
strength of man, especially of one in old age,
against that of mother earth? In vain he
strained his voice in loud shrieks for help!
All were flying for their lives, or seeking for
lost wives, children, parents; who had leisure
to think of an unconnected monk? And, in-
deed, had his whole monastery heard, what
aid could they have rendered him?
No key
had they to this strange, this fearful species
of gyve. Father Agazio, exhausted by his
efforts, had sunk in despair upon the knee he
could still bend, to prepare for death, when a
new concussion re-opened the fissure, and re-
leased his imprisoned limb. Instantaneously
the good Father's drooping energies revived;
he sprang upon his feet, hurried forwards, and
reached his cell without further mishap.

At Polistena two young mothers were sitting together, the one with a three-year old son playing at her feet, the other with a baby at her breast, when the first shock of the earthquake flung the roof-flung the whole cottage down upon the hapless group. Neither pain nor danger, scarcely death itself, can quell the strong impulse of maternal love. The mothers made vaulted roofs of their own bodies, to protect their offspring from the falling masses. So they died. So they were found, crushed, swollen, livid, and putrescent. Let us believe their last moments to have been soothed by the hope that they suffered not in vain. Delusive hope! They were disinterred too late-the helpless little objects of their care had withered. They lay wasted, dried up, dead in their mothers' bosoms.

A mother of Scido was more fortunate. Don Antonio Ruffo, and Donna Pasqualina Nota, a pair of wedded lovers, united little more than a year, had recently had their conjugal felicity augmented by the birth of a daughter. They were playfully caressing their infant, when the first awful concussion disturbed their peaceful enjoyment. The alarmed husband clapsed his wife and baby to his heart, to fly, or to perish with the objects of his affection. A beam from the falling roof struck the fond couple to the ground, and husband and wife died folded in each other's

Lovely was once the road from Soriano to Jerocarne, and sheltered from the noontide sun by the vines that festooned amidst over-arms. Their fate and their child's was lahanging olive and chestnut trees; and beneath mented, and the ruins were early searched in this verdant canopy was Father Agazio, prior order to give the regretted family Christian The sea and air participated in the disorder of the Carmine at Jerocarne, journeying when burial; when a faint cry quickened the zeal of of the earth, the former rising into such tower- surprised by the first shock of the earthquake. the workmen. The infant girl was found, still ing waves as rather resembled solid hills than In an instant the luxuriant trees were up-alive, between the bodies of her dead parents. heaped-up waters, and passing all appointed rooted, the whole path was a chaos of ruins. boundaries deluged inland regions to which The ground cracked, disclosing frightful clefts the very aspect of ocean was unknown; the that threatened to devour whatever approachlatter, by tempests, whirlwinds, and hurried; that closed again, again to open with canes, enhancing the calamities of the pro- every new shudder of the vexed earth. It vince, and further distracting the miserable inhabitants. And as though its immediate ravages had been little, the earthquake produce ulterior evils, whose action continued even after their cause had ceased. The fall of houses, instead of extinguishing the fires blazing on their hearths, often supplied fresh fuels in the boards and beams so flung upon them, whence burst out wide-spreading fires that the

were needless to describe the poor monk's
terror, or the anxious care with which he
strove to shun each hungry-looking chasm
Unavailing were his vigilance and activity.
Under one of his feet the ground suddenly
opened. The prior's leg sunk as its support
failed; and ere he could sufficiently recover
himself to snatch it out, the fissure as snd
denly re-closed, holding Father Agazio as

In different places two women severally remained seven days buried alive in vaults formed by the falling ruins. Both were of course without food or drink, but seem to have suffered comparatively little from hunger. Thirst was their torment, until they fainted; and when released and recalled to sense, their cries for water were frantic. At Oppido, a girl of fifteen was extricated on the eleventh day from her living grave. One of her hips was out of joint, a child of which she had the

care was dead in her arms, and she herself was quite insensible. On being with great difficulty restored to animation, her first words